Silver, Horace

The Horace Silver Quintets of 1954 and 1955—with Donald Byrd or Kenny Dorham on trumpet, Silver, Blakey, tenor Hank Mobley , and bassist Doug Watkins —were the seminal hard bop quintets of the mid-1950s. Silver's compositions, most notably “Quicksilver” and “The Preacher,” could be described by the loose term “funky.” At their core lay a mixture of gospel and blues (frequently in the “call-and-response” format of the African-American church) riding...